The Playbook to Fight Wildfires' Unseen Threat to Tap Water

Here are your headline stories for the morning of Tuesday, August 26th, 2025: 

• The Tubbs Fire that struck the North Bay in 2017 shed light on an unseen threat that wildfires pose to clean water supplies; and a civil engineering professor out of Indiana has devised the playbook that utilities rely on to address the contamination.
• As the redistricting battle heats up between California and Texas, Republican legislators in the Golden State are suing to block the plan spearheaded by Governor Newsom to gerrymander California in favor of House Democrats. The move aims to offset congressional gains that Texas would get with their own redistricting plans.

It Took One of the States Biggest Blazes to Shed Light on How Wildfires Threaten Water, and How to Respond

When the Eaton and Palisades fires ripped through Los Angeles and Ventura counties earlier this year, residents living in or near the burned communities were warned not to drink or cook with tap water because it was contaminated with known carcinogens; and yet, the actual reservoirs and water sources that serve the LA area were spared from the bulk of the blazes.

In past years, utilities would have looked at watersheds and reservoirs as the first place where contamination took place.

Then the Tubbs Fire struck in 2017, burning more than 36,000 acres across Sonoma, Napa and Lake counties. In the aftermath of that blaze, utilities learned that fire itself can sully clean water not just at the source, but at points of distribution, from treatment centers to the pipes.

That’s where Purdue University engineering professor Andrew Whelton has stepped in. He has come up with the playbook that utilities throughout the United States look to, when a wildfire has impacted public drinking water.

GOP Lawmakers Lob Legal Challenge at Gov. Newsom’s Redistricting Plans

A group of Republican lawmakers is asking the California Supreme Court to remove a redistricting initiative from the November ballot, arguing Democrats violated the law when they rushed the measure through to redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm election.

Democrats, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, last week placed Proposition 50 on a special November ballot. The initiative asks voters to throw out the maps drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission and approve new congressional districts, including five that are likely to flip from Republican to Democratic. It was written in response to Texas’ decision to redraw its own congressional districts to flip five seats from blue to red.

The lawsuit was filed as an emergency petition to the state Supreme Court on behalf of four GOP members of the state Legislature, three California voters and a former member of the state’s independent redistricting commission, which has been tasked with drawing congressional districts for the past decade.